WRF Modeling of Historical Landfalling New England Tropical Cyclones: Design and Climatology

New England tropical cyclones (TCs) can produce significant damage, as well as provide increased forecast track and intensity uncertainty for forecasters. This is the result of the fact that these TCs are often recurving, undergoing extratropical transition, and often are also forced via Midlatitude dynamics. Thus, not only do forecasters still struggle with forecasting these TCs, but of late, that region has not had enough cases to assess how our ability to predict these storms has advanced in an age when TCs can now be explicitly resolved by Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP). The predictability of historical landfalling New England Tropical Cyclones in terms of forecast track errors and intensity errors was explored through hindcasts of all landfalling New England TCs from 1900-2011. Utilizing version 4.1.1 of the Weather Forecast and Research Model Advanced Research WRF (WRF-ARW) with two outer fixed domains (27 km, 9km), as well as a vortex-following inner domain (3 km), we explored 36 cases from their initial best track point to a set period after landfall. As a result of utilizing relatively coarse ERA-20C analysis as boundary and initial conditions, a vortex removal and insertion scheme was utilized to provide the most realistic initial conditions for the hindcasts. This portion of the study will explain the WRF model set up, explore the limitations of ERA-20C reanalysis for TC modeling, the reasoning behind the study utilizing TC bogusing, and the results of each historical storms hindcast tracks. The analysis and results portion of this study are included in Part 2.